Our House

Essy’s Carriage House best serves those souls who feed on nostalgia

By Warren Rojas / Photography by Kate Bohler

Time, or so the saying asserts, waits for no one.

But I have been to a place that defies the turning of the clock by appeasing its Greatest Generation-aged guests with nostalgia-inducing environs that haven’t changed in decades, and nourishing their tired bodies with indicatively European preparations.

Your tour guide on this quantum culinary leap: Essy’s Carriage House founder Essy Saedi.

According to his wife and business partner, Janet, Saedi entered the hospitality industry under the watchful eye of a Belgian-born, French-trained chef. Saedi practiced his Continental training at various D.C. dining institutions—including Billy Martin’s Carriage House (Georgetown) and the Gangplank (Waterfront)—before purchasing Uncle Nick’s Family Restaurant in 1975 and transforming it into his eponymous establishment.

Saedi is credited with sprucing up the original, main dining room by introducing white table cloths and freshly picked flowers.

That initial sweep may have, in fact, marked the pinnacle of his interior designing powers.

The wedge-shaped main dining room features vinyl-wrapped booths running along both sides of the tapered-down-to-a-point walls, with a handful of free-standing tables occupying the center lane. Bizarro knickknacks beg for further explanation, including the life-sized nutcracker standing guard at one end of the dining room and a statue of a miniature bucking bronco-riding cowboy prominently featured in the front window. Factor in the ancient wall coverings (green corduroy wallpaper; blurry wagons endlessly circling around the faded trim), clouded over chandeliers (pretty sure the fact that there’s just a single bulb burning back there adds to the low light penetration), water-stained ceiling tiles and wide-mouth ashtray still bolted above the facilities in the men’s room, and you’ve got yourself a spot that perhaps last “hopped” during the waning days of the Ford administration.

Janet says they recently completed some upgrades to the exterior, and confirms that they are aware of the much- needed touch ups inside. “The current economy has slowed us down a bit with our plans, but we hope to move forward by summer 2011,” she says of the interior renovation plans.

The intercontinental menu, on the other hand, appears to remain very much a work in progress.

Janet says Saedi built up his initial following by introducing neighborhood diners to the likes of hand-butchered, certified Angus beef and freshly imported seafood. Once he had them hooked, Saedi purportedly reeled in those early supporters with homespun specialties like his signature crab cakes, braised short ribs, veal osso bucco and beef Stroganoff.

The next evolution was sparked by a couple of happy accidents—the first being a meeting of the culinary minds Janet says was set in motion by Saedi off-handedly asking her Polish-German grandmother for guidance on how best to capitalize on a surplus veal shipment (Janet said the old woman took him into the kitchen and taught Saedi the magic of wiener schnitzel), and the second being the steady drumbeat from their most devoted fans for heartier German fare (which compelled Saedi to experiment with the likes of sauerbraten and schweinebraten).

The current menu reflects Saedi’s cumulative experience, weaving together throwback touchstones, like sautéed calf liver, veal Francaise and lamb chops with mint jelly, with modern nibbles like hummus, fried calamari and pulled pork barbecue.

Baked French onion soup is absolutely heartwarming, summoning a crock nearly bubbling over with onion- and celery-laden stock generously pre-loaded with croutons, blanketed in molten Swiss cheese and sprinkled with a bonus shot of grated Parmesan cheese.

A curiously sectioned-off beef Stroganoff suffers from its unwisely segregated components. The half dozen or so nuggets of slow-simmered beef seems absolutely naked sans its usual accompaniments—no onions or mushrooms ever materialize on the tip of my fork turned probe—a flavor deficit only exacerbated by the decision to banish the accompanying tangle of thin, flat noodles all the way across the plate (at least, spoon some of the beef stew atop the noodles).

London broil proves much more satisfying, delivering succulent slices of pull-apart tender steak smothered in savory onion gravy, punctuated by freshly cracked black pepper.

Twin filets of thinly pounded veal are woefully overly breaded, the golden crust hanging on each slender scaloppini like a trench coat on a toddler. The surrounding silver dollar-sized potato patties are crispy little treats, albeit rather fleeting ones (I feel like I could handily dispatch the spuds in three swift bites), while marinated cabbage proves remarkably pungent (the only element of this particular meal that genuinely surpasses all of my culinary-investigating expectations).

The house crab cakes are fairly impressive, revealing broiled-till-lightly-charred mounds of pulled jumbo lump meat mixed with capers, sweet bell peppers and zesty mustard. The plastic tub of cocktail sauce riding shotgun is unequivocally lowbrow, but the tangy red sauce certainly does do its job well.

Most marquee sweets are supplied by outside vendors. “Essy makes a very popular rice pudding, and I make chocolate mousse; otherwise, we purchase all of our desserts from local bakeries,” Janet confesses.

Still, they do pull from the cream of the confectionary crop.

“You can’t leave that. That’s the good stuff,” Saedi counsels when he spots a half-eaten slice of Carnegie Deli cheesecake on the table. Just be prepared to share, because the iconic cream cheese construct is thicker than your average phonebook and so incredibly rich, your teeth may begin to throb from just looking at it.

Lemon meringue pie (courtesy of Winchester-based Schenck Foods Co.) floors one dining companion. “That’s like eating an eight-by-10 lemon bar,” my dessert buddy exclaims after biting into the mass of marshmallow-y sweetness cut with citric gusto (jelly-like filling is bitingly tart).

I highly doubt that Saedi’s cooking will ever win any awards.

But the old timers who occupy the worn seats don’t seem terribly interested in chasing the hot or the new.

To wit, one visit unexpectedly stretched past two hours, as my companion and I conversed and just generally enjoyed each other’s company. And that seems to be Saedi’s real specialty—helping guests savor those precious few moments stolen from a world determined to strip every last second away from us.

Essy’s Carriage House
4030 Lee Highway, Arlington; 703-525-7899; www.essyscarriagehouse.com

Hours: Open for lunch Monday through Saturday, dinner daily, brunch Sunday.
Prices: Average entree: $21 to $30 ($$$).

(January 2011)